“I did a nice thing”: David Foster Wallace and the Gift Economy James McAdams Lehigh University I The artist appeals to that part of our being which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation. Joseph Conrad Nigger of the Narcissus hile david foster wallace only began writing seriously Whalfway through his undergraduate career, he experienced success at an extremely young age, an outcome he would later regret. Initially a self- described “hard-core syntax weenie,” Wallace studied mathematical theory and modal logic at the University of Amherst until becoming exposed to avant-garde fiction, in particular Donald Barthelme’s “The Red Balloon.” Not until then, he admits, did he realize that those very special “clicks” one encounters in academia, described by a professor as “mathematical experi- ences,” were essentially “aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce’s original sense” (McCaffery 138). Ultimately, the work of fiction he submitted for ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 119–133 his English honours thesis would later be published as The Broom of the System, a zany, Pynchonesque novel replete with clever pyrotechnics and allusions to Wittgenstein, from whom it receives its title. James McAdams’s However, as early as 1987, when he was obtaining his mfa at the Uni- fiction, creative non- versity of Arizona, Wallace had grown ambivalent about the success and fiction, and academic self-indulgent style of The Broom of the System. In 1993, he explained that essays have been the popularity of The Broom of the System mystified him, acknowledging, published in numerous “there’s a lot of stuff in that novel I’d like to reel back in and do better” (136). venues, including Much of his ambivalence involved the novel’s penchant for what he iden- Kritikos, Connotations, tifies as narcissistic and egoistic writerly games that “deny” the essential Readings: A Journal for fact that “the writer is over here with his agenda while the reader’s over Scholars and Readers, there … This paradox is what makes good fiction sort of magical, I think.” Wreck Park Journal, Wallace laments, “The paradox can’t be resolved, but it can somehow be Superstition Review, mediated—re-mediated” (137 emphasis added). This remediation takes the Amazon’s Day One, form of Wallace re-imagining art as not performative and self-indulgent decomP, Literary but, rather, as a gift. Orphans, and boaat At the same time he was reconsidering his own approach to fiction, Press, among others. His Wallace began to also re-evaluate his attitudes toward the metafictional research interests include and postmodern writers whose techniques had influenced his debut novel. postpostmodernism, These authors, including Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, Robert creative writing, the Coover, and John Barth, had attracted the younger Wallace with their digital humanities, and works’ ironic humour, erudition, formal sophistication, and aesthetic inno- the medical humanities. vation. As he became more critical of his own work, though, as well as Before attending college, the culture at large, Wallace began to question the effectiveness of these he worked as a social methods in a society dominated by corporate interests, marketing brands, worker in the mental and political cynicism. Ultimately, as he told David Lipsky about his time health industry in in late-80s Arizona: Philadelphia. He is a PhD I was just really stuck about writing … I didn’t know whether candidate in English at I really loved to write or whether I’d just gotten some kind of Lehigh University, where excited about having some early success. The story at the end he also teaches and edits of Curious [“Westward the Course of Empire Goes Its Way”], the university’s literary which not a lot of people like, was really meant to be extremely journal, Amaranth. His sad. And to sort of be a kind of suicide note. And I think by creative and academic the time I got to the end of that story, I figured I wasn’t going work can be viewed at to write anymore. (61) jamesmcadams.net. In “Westward,” Mark Nechtr, Wallace’s alter-ego, observes “metafiction is untrue, as a lover. It cannot betray. It can only reveal. Itself is its only object. It’s the act of a lonely solipsist’s self-love.” Conversely, the narra- tor reveals, Mark Nechtr “desires, some distant hard-earned day, to write 120 | McAdams something that stabs you in the heart. That pierces you, makes you think you’re going to die. Maybe it’s called metalife. Or metafiction. Or realism. Or gfhrytytu. He doesn’t know. He wonders who the hell really cares” (Girl With Curious Hair 332). If this story is a suicide note for a certain style, it also lays out an agenda or hope for resurrection in another kind of style, one that would soon come to be termed “The New Sincerity.”1 Wallace’s most complete formulation of what this “new sincerity” might look like occurs in his 1991 essay “E Unibus Pluram,” in what Marshall Boswell has described as “one of the most important pieces in [Wallace’s] growing corpus of nonfiction” (9). In the rousing terminal passages of the essay, Wallace imagines a literary revolution, an aesthetic counterattack by a generation raised on metafictive games and postmodern irony. In so doing, he envisions that the next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels … who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions and in U.S life … These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere … that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. (81) Following from these prescriptions the most persistent and idiosyn- cratic characteristic of David Foster Wallace’s writing, evident in the break- through novel Infinite Jest, his justly celebrated narrative journalism, and his interviews and speeches, is its conviction that literature should be empathetic and selfless, generating meaning in the transactional space between writer and reader. In order to accomplish this objective, according to Wallace, the author must assume the responsibility to be generous and sincere, thus avoiding manipulating the reader the way the mass enter- tainment industry and advertising culture manipulates the consumer. He explains this responsibility at length in a famous riff to McCaffery, figuring these new paradigms of sincerity and the gift as a form of “love”: You’ve got to discipline yourself to talk out of the part of you that loves, loves what you’re working on. Maybe that just plain loves …The big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart purpose, the agenda of the con- sciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love 1 See Adam Kelly’s “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction” and “Dialectic of Sincerity: Lionel Trilling and David Foster Wallace.” “I did a nice thing” | 121 … It seems like one of the things really great fiction-writers do is give the readers something. (140)2 Even in the realm of the literary world, Wallace worried, this lack of genuine concern and respect for the consumer was becoming more preva- lent, as commercial forces contaminated the aesthetic domain, reducing fiction to a kind of “trash.” In this situation, readers become less active par- ticipants in the creation of meaning and more similar to passive recipients, like spectators at the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Therefore, a new kind of generous and difficult fiction becomes necessary, he argues, to challenge, not placate, the reader. “If avant-garde stuff can do its job,” he explained to David Lipsky, “[it] seduces the reader into making extraordinary efforts that he wouldn’t normally make. And that’s the kind of magic that really great art can do … You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he thought he was” (71). In Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson conducts a sophisticated and compelling analysis of the con- temporary conflation of state bureaucracy and big business, commerce, and art. Advancing Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of “The Culture Industry,” Jameson describes this new system with tenacity and vigour, stating that economics has swallowed culture, making art susceptible to and equivalent to commodified goods. Writing primarily about architec- ture, but all art production by extension, including fiction, Jameson asserts “what has happened today is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally” (4). This thesis operates as an implicit assumption throughout Wallace’s oeuvre. A decade before Jameson’s Postmodernism, Lewis Hyde published The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. While Hyde’s motive and approach certainly vary from Jameson’s, he concurs with Jameson’s analysis that this commercial exploitation of art is a uniquely modern phe- nomenon, writing in a passage that anticipates Wallace, “the exploitation of the arts which we find in the twentieth century is without precedent. The particular manner in which radio, television, the movies, and the recording industry have commercialized song and drama is wholly new …The more we allow such commodity art to define and control our gifts, the less gifted we will become, as individuals and as a society” (158–59, emphasis added). 2 For a compelling and provocative discussion about just how this purpose oper- ates (and whether it is ultimately successful), see Holland.